Sports Books

[Patrick Murtha]

I’m not as much “into” sports as I used to be, because everything has gotten pretty ugly (just like real life). But I still like sports history, especially baseball, and there is good sports fiction too. As with true crime, a good sports book will inevitably have an interesting sociological dimension.

Among baseball novels, I particularly recommend Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (I don’t like the movie, which alters the ending and glosses up everything) and Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association,

Here are sone non-fiction sports books, again mostly baseball, that I have read recently.

Edward Achorn, Fifty-nine in ‘84 (I love 19th Century baseball…)

Edward Achorn, The Summer of Beer and Whiskey (…of which Ed Achorn is the expert)

H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, and A Dream (good bestseller)

Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit: An American Legend (ditto)

Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer (see post below)

Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (another good bestseller)

Christy Mathewson, Pitching in a Pinch: Baseball from the Inside (see post below)

Matt McCarthy, Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit (entertaining)

Cait Murphy, Crazy ‘08 (that’s 1908. See post below)

Burt Solomon, Where They Ain’t (1890s Baltimore Orioles, excellent book)

Mike Sowell The Pitch that Killed (moving account of death of Ray Chapman)

Neal Thompson, Driving with the Devil (the birth of NASCAR, here’s that sociological dimension I spoke of)

 

[Patrick Murtha]

The material is fascinating, the research is good, and anyone who enjoys baseball history or, indeed, social history of this time period will benefit from reading Crazy '08. But - and it is a big but - Cait Murphy's writing style is amateurish, cutesy-casual, and faux-hip, amounting to a deeply misguided attempt to sound early 21st Century while describing the early 20th Century. It does not work.

Murphy has not made a strong case that 1908 was the greatest baseball season ever. How great could it be with a blah World Series that she dismisses in a couple of sentences? The pennant races WERE great (although she gives short shrift to the American League as compared to the National), the human dramas were definitely compelling, and it would in no way diminish the choice of subject if the 1908 season were simply GREAT as opposed to the GREATEST. But that's the world of non-fiction marketing nowadays: Everything has to be a game-changer, everything has to be a turning point ("Cod, the fish that changed the world!"). It grows ridiculous.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

Ray Chapman was an urbane, Christy Mathewson-type, and I am a huge fan even at a century’s distance. Mike Sowell’s The Pitch That Killed is a great and moving account of the tragedy and of the lives of Chapman and Carl Mays.

Chapman’s death is always cited as unique, but that is true only for major league ball. Between 1906 and 1951, at least a dozen minor leaguers were killed by pitched balls, and that’s not even looking at other levels of the game.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

The legendary status of The Boys of Summer is well-deserved - it is unquestionably one of the finest non-fiction sports books ever written. However, be aware: It is the very opposite of a "feel good" read. In fact, I can scarcely remember a book that is so suffocatingly sad. The players of the Brooklyn Dodgers of the early Fifties (as well as a number of others associated with the team in various ways) experienced an unusually high number of foreshortened careers, personal tragedies (especially involving sons), and early deaths. It doesn't make for a cheerful book.

Is professional sports inherently a tragic enterprise? Kahn suggests as much. It may not really be that desirable to hit the peak of your life at age 25, with the skills for which you are valued in inevitable decline after that, and your ability to do what you do at all almost certainly over by age 40. Maybe the money makes up for this, and of course the money is better now than it used to be, but you wonder.

It could be that Kahn makes just a little too much of the aging issue, partly because of the fact that he is focusing on athletes, partly because attitudes were different then. He persistently describes a man's forties as a kind of middle-aged twilight, and I don't think that we look at it that way anymore (which is a good change!). Athletes still age out of their sports, of course, but a lot of them are thinking about that inevitability early on, planning their future careers in sports management or broadcasting or other businesses or even politics. One gets the sense that the old-time ballplayers didn't look ahead in that way, and faded back into ordinary life without much mental preparation. Some wound up doing OK, but many did not.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

Christy Mathewson, Pitching in a Pinch: Baseball from the Inside - Terrifically entertaining and insightful read from my favorite player of all time. There is really a “voice” there.

One of the many characteristics that set Christy apart was that he was a college boy (Bucknell), and in that era that made him an urbane intellectual by definition. He lived up to the image: “In his free time, Mathewson enjoyed nature walks, reading, golf, and checkers.”

Guy also never took a bad photograph. ?

My maternal grandfather, who was born on May 18, 1892, was a real newsie on the streets of NYC. He lived with my family and told me great stories about old-time baseball, especially Christy and the New York Giants. So my connection to Mathewson has a personal dimension.

My grandfather also taught me to read at age three because I demanded it. This was kind of a legendary story in the family.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

Here’s a terrific essay on two rediscovered cricket novels, one by Patrick Hamilton’s brother Bruce, that embody class themes in an entertaining way. (C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary is also a must, cricket-literature-wise.)

https://www.thecricketmonthly.com/s...ket-novels-of-dudley-carew-and-bruce-hamilton

 

[Leemo]

I'm really drawn to the idea of a true literary master focusing their talents on the world of sport, although the only time I've experienced that is Don DeLillo's End Zone, which I think is brilliant. It delves into the common vocabulary between American football and war, and the 30+ page narration of a football game captures what American football is better than if you were to watch it on screen. It's also crazy to me that the book is 50 years old and yet still describes the football of today precisely. A personal favourite.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

^ Now that is one I should read! I’m weak on DeLillo generally.

 

[Ben Jackson]

Don't really know sports books, but Bernard Malamud has been on my radar for sometime now (as he was shortlisted for the Nobel few years before his demise). Unfortunately, I haven't seen his books. Norman Mailer did publish an essay on Muhammaed Ali's fight and Oates wrote some essays on boxing as well.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

Oh yes, Mailer was good in this field as a “New Journalist”.

Malamud’s The Natural is a great American novel, in my opinion.

 

[Stevie B]

I’m not as much “into” sports as I used to be, because everything has gotten pretty ugly (just like real life). But I still like sports history, especially baseball, and there is good sports fiction too. As with true crime, a good sports book will inevitably have an interesting sociological dimension.

I'm a big sports fan, something that has often come as a shock to students when I'm chitchatting about weekend games prior to start of a Monday class. I suppose being a book lover, wearing glasses, and not having a muscular physique send the wrong message.

Despite enjoying sports, I don't often read books about them. Here's a link to a Sports Illustrated article on the 100 greatest sports books ever written. I've only read two of them (Fat City and Into Thin Air), though there is a nice mix of fiction and non-fiction.

Sports Illustrated's Top 100 Sports Books of All Time

Sports Illustrated put together the top 100 sports books of all time. Of the titles on their list, 55 titles are available in accessible formats from the Wisconsin Talking Book and Braille Library catalog. Below is the list with the description and call number for books available through WTBBL...

dpi.wi.gov

 

[Patrick Murtha]

^ What age of students are you teaching? High school, university, adult?

 

[Stevie B]

^ What age of students are you teaching? High school, university, adult?

I've taught both high school and college students in the States and overseas in subjects ranging from EFL/ESL to film and lit to academic skill building. In my current position, I am a college academic advisor who teaches one First Year Experience course each semester. It's not the most exciting class to teach, but I enjoy the challenge of finding creative approaches and getting students to engage.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

Sounds cool! High school is my sweet spot, but I have enjoyed teaching university and adults too. Middle school is…challenging (but I have experience with it). Upper elementary (grades 4-6, ages 9-11) can be tolerable; 4th graders in particular are sweet-natured. Below 4th grade is not my cup of tea; they can’t even tie their shoelaces or put on their coats. ?

I started my teaching career by subbing for a few years, so I got experience with EVERYTHING. Invaluable.

 

[kpjayan]

Here’s a terrific essay on two rediscovered cricket novels, one by Patrick Hamilton’s brother Bruce, that embody class themes in an entertaining way. (C.L.R. James’s Beyond a Boundary is also a must, cricket-literature-wise.)

https://www.thecricketmonthly.com/s...ket-novels-of-dudley-carew-and-bruce-hamilton

CLR James' book is brilliant.

Here is the Guardian's selection of 10 best Cricket writing.

Top 10 books about cricket

Acclaimed historian David Kynaston selects favourites from one of sport’s richest literatures

www.theguardian.com

Ramachandra Guha ( Bangalore based historian, written many sumptuous books about post Independent India ) is also a fabulous writer about cricket. One of his books appears in the Guardian Top10.

 

[Stevie B]

Sounds cool! High school is my sweet spot, but I have enjoyed teaching university and adults too. Middle school is…challenging (but I have experience with it). Upper elementary (grades 4-6, ages 9-11) can be tolerable; 4th graders in particular are sweet-natured. Below 4th grade is not my cup of tea; they can’t even tie their shoelaces or put on their coats. ?

I started my teaching career by subbing for a few years, so I got experience with EVERYTHING. Invaluable.

Most of my teaching positions, especially early on, involved working with motivated, mature, and polite international students, so the adjustment to teaching American high school students was a bumpy one at first. It took some time to figure out classroom management, but I quickly learned to limit lecturing, to be creative in lesson planning, and to build relationships with students so that they'd work with you.

My only experience teaching very young students was in Japan in an after school program. The kids were squirrely and a huge communication gap existed. I quickly decided it wasn't worth the extra money.

So did you mostly teach history or were you a jack of all trades, so to speak?

 

[Patrick Murtha]

Definitely jack of all trades, “Profesor de humanidades”. Although my Master of Arts in Teaching is in English, I taught more history and social sciences than English in my high school career. At Tec Prepa in Culiacán, World History and History of Philosophy were my base courses, followed by Introduction to Social Sciences and a couple of Art History classes.

I was lucky to teach mostly very motivated students both in the US and internationally, which meant that yes, their families were financially comfortable. A couple of times I did have experiences teaching students from more challenged socioeconomic positions, and although it may be ignoble of me to say it, I came to the conclusion that wasn’t for me. Those students were “nice” (mostly), they liked me (mostly), but they didn’t know how to “do” school, they had no “classroom competence”, and I was surely not going to be able to inculcate behaviors in high school students that they should have picked up in elementary. I’m no savior.

I’m actually a pretty decent classroom manager, and I know how to engage students in the ways you mention, but my passion is for communicating the subjects in as much complexity as the grade level allows. I think that my students would say that my classes were “fun”, not boring, but that the contents were VERY challenging, and my tests and exams were scary as hell. I liked that reputation; I aimed for that balance between engaging and challenging. And in most of these high school teaching situations, public or private, the track was clearly “college prep”, so I made everything as university-like as possible.

 

[Stevie B]

I think you nailed it when you emphasized the importance of challenging students and that academic rigor was an integral part of classes you taught. I always harkened back to the film "Stand and Deliver" and Jaime Escalante's insistence that students, most of them anyways, would rise to the level of a teacher's expectations.

 

[Patrick Murtha]

^ I was raised on academic rigor myself, all the way, and I bless the teachers who embodied that. So I was always going to be that kind of teacher myself. The first meeting of a class was devoted to setting the goals and expectations. Students never said, “You didn’t warn us.” ?

With high school students, I made it clear that I didn’t think they were kids anymore. I would respect and challenge and listen to them as young adults. They warmed to that.

 

[kpjayan]

Few of the Footbal ( Soccer, if you may ) writings that I liked are

Franklin Foer - How Football Explains the World
Eduardo Galeano - Soccer in Sun and Shadow
Nick Hornby - Fever Pitch

Also the Chapter on 'Soccer War' of Kapuscinsky's book ( though it is less to do with Soccer, more to do with the 72 hr war)